i choose not to 'get over it'

The Dodd at Ipse Dixit believes that anyone still upset over the travesty of the 2000 Presidential election should "Get over it already." No doubt, Bush has pretended that he has a mandate, and it'd be awfully convenient for the Republicans if everyone else would get with that program as well. Still, I suspect that if things had turned out differently, we still wouldn't have heard the end of it from the Right.

...there is no doubt that American democracy suffered a grievous wound....for the first time since the nineteenth century the United States is governed by a President who, as a candidate, was rejected at the polls.

The victory of a popular-vote loser in the Electoral College...would have created a ticklish dilemma even if it had happened cleanly. It did not happen cleanly. Florida was an unremitting travesty, right down to the awarding of the state and the Presidency to George W. Bush by the five most conservative Justices of the Supreme Court, in a decision so shoddily reasoned and so at odds with their normal jurisprudential inclinations that the only plausible explanation for it is that they were simply imposing their political preference.

The new President's response to all this was to ignore it. He made no attempt to broaden his government or to mitigate its program of putting money in the pockets of the rich, rolling back environmental protections, favoring energy extraction over conservation, and the rest. Bush's intransigence demanded a response, and it must be said that Gore did not provide one.

swank astronomy news of the day

halloween roundup

Last night I took the girls trick-or-treating up and down the block. Cecilia dressed up as a bat; my lovely wife made her a set of bat wings, and I made her some ears. Naomi was a cat, which pretty much meant black sweats and a pair of store-bought cat ears and tail. Despite the fact that less than half the houses on our block had their porch lights on, the girls cleaned up in terms of candy, and Cecilia was very charming as she clambered up the various porch steps, knocked on the doors, and said "Trick or treating!" Eventually they got so loaded up that I stopped bringing Naomi up...there's no way she's going to eat that much candy, and if she did we'd have one wired toddler on our hands.

After the girls settled down for bed, we watched our new DVD of Halloween. All in all, it was a very pleasant and special holiday.

update

I mentioned earlier this month that a federal judge struck down an Alabama law banning the sale of sex toys on grounds that it violated the right to privacy. Now state Attorney General Bill Pryor has filed an appeal of the ruling with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, ensuring that the state will be the subject of jokes among late-night comics and bloggers (as well as spending a healthy chunk of taxpayers' money) for some time to come.

...and another

horror wallpaper of the day

Today's horror wallpaper shows zombies roaming a shopping mall in a scene from 1978's Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romero's superlative sequel to the 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. A deft blend of horror, comedy, gore (supplied my special effects master Tom Savini, who also makes a couple of cameo appearances) and social commentary, Dawn surpasses its excellent predecessor and stands as perhaps the definitive zombie movie. Indeed, its success in Europe spawned the legion of Italian zombie movies we know and love. Dawn was released in Italy as Zombi; prompting Lucio Fulci's 1979 not-exactly sequel to be released as Zombi 2, arriving in the US called simply Zombie. As the guys from Teleport City point out, the situation is reminiscent of the whole Big Boss/Chinese Connection/Fist of Fury naming debacle that affected Bruce Lee movies.

muppet link of the day

a slow week...

...well, as far as this blog is concerned, anyway. I'm pretty busy with work/Halloween preparations/other personal matters, and I owe Destroy All Monsters a review or two. (I have not even been through my blogroll today!) So look for posting to be light for the rest of today at least. I hope to be back in the swing of things by the end of the week.

flying high

A restored World War II P-38 Lightning fighter took to the skies today for the first ime in 60 years. The plane, dubbed "Glacier Girl," was among a flight of six fighters and two bombers that were forced to crash-land on a Greenland glacier on July 15, 1942. A team of rescuers on dogsleds saved all the flight's crew, at least one of whom was on hand to witness today's flight. Over the years the abandoned planes were buried under tons of snow and ice, but Glacier Girl was recovered in 1992 and restored in a ten-year project. Awesome.

horror wallpaper of the day

As we celebrate the final countdown toward Halloween, the last batch of wallpapers are going to be from the coolest horror flicks ever (not that they pretty much haven't been all along). Let's kick things off with an old-school reference: some classic Universal horror, in this case James Whale's 1931 classic Frankenstein, which launched the long horror career of a British actor named William Henry Pratt, who achieved fame under the stage name Boris Karloff.

non-zombie link of the day

I also wanted to mention that review site Unknown Movies has a look at one of my favorite bad movies: Blind Fury, starring Rutger Hauer. In a sort of twisted take on the Zatoichi films, Hauer plays a blind Vietnam vet who learns how to master swordplay and winds up taking on a horde of bad guys from the local mob. It's a hoot.